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Blu-ray or HDTV?

When it comes to true high definition on recorded media, you’ll need to upgrade your home theater system to feature a DVD player that is capable of keeping up with your high definition television, such as a plasma or LCD unit. While progressive scan DVDs make a good effort, they aren’t capable of fully taking advantage of true high definition, either playing it or recording it.

Many newer standard DVD players feature technology called upscaling. This maximizes the quality of DVD, giving you better detail and color quality. While these DVD players do an even better job at coming close to true high defiition, you still won’t get the best quality that is available.

That is where true high definition technology comes in. The good news is that it is finally available. The bad news is that there are two competing formats, and it is inevitable that one format will win out over the other, making the losing format obsolete; remember Betamax?

Both formats use a blue laser technology instead of the standard red laser. The blue laser has a shorter wavelength and uses a disc that is the same size of the standard DVD disc but can store much more data.

The two competing technologies are HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. My personal opinion is that Blu-Ray will win out. It has a better, more innovative technology, and more and more prominent movie companies, such as Warner Brothers, are supporting Blue-Ray exclusively. Standard DVDs will still be made as well. That is not to say that hit movies won’t be available on HD-DVD: Shrek 3 is one example, but more movie companies seem to be quickly switching over to Blu-Ray. At the moment, Lions Gate, MGM, Miramax, Twentieth Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, and Warner Brothers all support Blu-Ray. HD-DVD is currently supported by BCI, Dreamworks, New Line Cinema, Paramount Pictures, New Line, Studio Canal, and Universal Pictures.

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About Mary Ann Romans

Mary Ann Romans is a freelance writer, online content manager, wife and mother of three children. She lives in Pennsylvania in the middle of the woods but close enough to Target and Home Depot.
The author of many magazine, newspaper and online articles, Mary Ann enjoys writing about almost any subject. "Writing gives me the opportunity to both learn interesting information, and to interact with wonderful people."
Mary Ann has written more than 5,000 blogs for Families.com since she started back in December 2006.
Contact her at maromans AT verizon.net or visit her personal blog http://homeinawoods.wordpress.com